1
UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Mereb Mossman
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: October 4, 1989
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WL: I’d like to begin by discussing your early career at this institution, at what was then
Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina]. And I wonder if you’d—just to
begin, tell me a little bit about your background briefly, how you arrived here, where you
were born, what your education was—
MM: Why I came?
WL: Why you came, things like that, what brought you here.
MM: I came September of 1937. I had just spent six teaching years in a woman’s college
[Ginling College] in China. I had just returned to America in June of 1937 and gotten to
my folks’ little summer cottage in Colorado. And the dean from the University of
Chicago School of Social Work called me, and Dean Abbott said, “Professor [Glen]
Johnson from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina is here, and he
would like to interview you,”—she had told him about me—“for a position at the
Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina.” I said, “Oh, Dean Abbott, why
another woman’s college?”
I’d been in a women’s college and had thought I was just going back to the
University of Chicago, and be there and do a little teaching, as I had done before I left, in
the department and School of Social Work and finish my degree. And she said, “They
need someone with your background.” And she said, “Frank [Porter] Graham is the
president of The University of North Carolina. That’s why you should go to Woman’s
College. Think about it.”
So I went to Kansas City immediately and talked with Professor Johnson. And he
was very convincing about this is a very fine liberal arts college for women with a great
future. And I had no real reason in 1937 not to take a job, it was just that I hadn’t planned
to do it. But I came, and I stayed for thirty-six years until I retired. But I came because—
primarily because—in sociology they were looking for someone to work in the applied
area, and that’s where my strengths lay.
WL: So they were trying to expand the department and the whole area of applied sociology?
2
MM: Right, right. Sociology had just separated from economics and [inaudible] was head of
economics. And sociology was building, and they brought Dr. [Lyda Gordon] Shivers in
from Chapel Hill who had just finished her degree there to teach in the area of
criminology and family. And they were hunting for someone in the applied area to teach
primarily community, social statistics and sociology. And all of us taught introductory
sociology, and I was to do social problems. And that was really the reason I came to the
university—to Woman’s College.
But the Woman’s College, at that time, had just become a part of the Consolidated
University of North Carolina, which was a three institution, [North Carolina] State
[University], [The University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill and us. So we were called
the Woman’s College of The University of North Carolina. This had connotations that no
one really knew at that time might develop very interestingly. But we were still a
women’s college within the system.
And at that time, women were not admitted to undergraduate work at Chapel Hill
and State, so that we were the women’s institution. And we drew from all over the state
and the region and had a percentage of out-of-state students for women who wanted a
college degree.
WL: So that this institution had a kind of a monopoly or had a monopoly on the women in
North Carolina.
MM: Within the state system and the university system. Not in colleges—other state
colleges—but in the university system.
WL: What kind of a reputation did it have, coming in 1937? What kinds of things had you
heard about it?
MM: It had the reputation for being a very fine and good liberal arts college. At that time,
actually, we were educating—a large proportion of our women went into teaching. But
they always went through a liberal arts core of work before they took certification courses
in education in their—largely their junior and senior years—to teach in either primary,
secondary schools, mostly in the state of North Carolina.
WL: So what was part of the core curriculum, basic kind of history and—?
MM: History, social science, science, language requirements, primarily. And we, through the
years, in the next ten to fifteen years, the curriculum committee was always at work on
the basic curriculum. And the schools—well, there were no schools, they were all
departments at that time that had—that were preparing students for teaching—were really
committed to the core in the liberal arts and then developed into majors, largely in their
junior and senior years. And they went out with strong majors in their department.
And the minimum of education requirements, which varied, from time to time,
anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one hours. I think in all of our teacher education
programs they did supervised teaching. And then we established—and I’ve forgotten the
year—a practice school on campus, Curry School, and that went through high school, so
that students had a good portion of their experience on the campus, actually practice
3
teaching, and then would go out into the community for some portion of their supervised
teaching experience.
But the departments that now we think of as professional and not in the College of
Arts and Sciences, like home economics. That was a field, a very strong, open field for
women—business education, teaching—preparing for secretarial work and teaching
business education. Physical education—we had a very strong physical education,
women’s physical education, department. A fine department of music—it’s hard for me
to say department now, we’ve said school and college for so long—department of music.
And again, music education was the field that was open, but we also had fine—we did
not prepare professional musicians, but we had a very fine program in which we did
prepare persons to, well, practice for work in voice and piano teaching.
WL: Art? What about art?
MM: Well, art started—I’ve forgotten the year they started—and we developed a strong art
department. And then creative writing was started, later in the English department. But all
this was in the departmental structure and in applied work in sociology. Development in
public welfare opened up a field of work for social workers, and so we developed a pre-professional
program in social work which was certified at the state level. And our
students went out in the counties all over the state in the public welfare as social workers,
and that was a new field.
Now we did not have nursing; we had a pre-nursing program. But Chapel Hill had
the nursing program and preempted that. Through the years we tried to get a program, but
it wasn’t until much later that we were able to develop that.
WL: You’ve suggested something about the—well, we’ve been talking, I guess, about the
curriculum. What about the faculty that you found in your early years here? How would
you characterize the faculty? What were they like; what were their interests?
MM: Well, to tell you the truth, they were very much like the liberal arts faculty in the college
in which I taught in China. It was a women’s college, a sister college to Smith College,
and a very fine liberal arts college there. The—well, there were two women’s colleges in
China, but it was in Nanking. And it [Woman’s College] had devoted—predominantly
women faculty who—most of whom had their master’s, some of whom had their PhDs—
who were devoted teachers. And they were—now you might say that sounds like a high
school teacher, but they were fine college teachers at that time for the women who came
with the kind of background they came from—from high school. And it was a life on
campus that was a very community-minded life with an integration of the academic and
the social life of the campus brought together.
And the whole notion of educating a woman—Dr. McIver’s “Educate a woman,
you educate a family.” But it was you were getting a woman ready for a job because at
that time—bear in mind there were many women went out into teaching, secretarial or
social work positions but they anticipated marriage. And, by and large, they anticipated
stopping work and having their family. This was the model at that time so—
WL: Marriage was incompatible with work?
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MM: No. At that time, it just wasn’t done as much as it came to be. There weren’t daycare
centers and so forth, and women hadn’t moved into careers where they continued work as
they did later in the fifties and sixties and moved into a new way of thinking.
So at that time—you asked when I came what was it like—these were well-qualified,
undergraduate teachers who were committed to seeing that their students had
learning opportunities and did all kinds of extracurricular things to bring them into new
kinds of learning experiences. These were faculty that were devoted faculty, but they
were not a research—what I would call a scholarly faculty.
But in many ways, many of them were scholarly teachers. They kept studying all
the time and working, but they did not do independent study. The teaching loads were
twelve hours,—by and large that was the pattern. That was four courses and often four
different courses—a couple of sections of introductory and then a couple of advanced
sections.
WL: Four different preparations. On what basis were the faculty advanced? Was it exclusively
based on teaching?
MM: Teaching and community service, interestingly enough. And when I say community
service, that was community and professional service, activities related to—for example,
participation in sociology, I’ll use as an illustration participation in the Southern
Sociological Society and then helping form a state society of sociologists. Scholarly in
that way so that I often, when people say, “Well, you didn’t have any scholars,” “Well,
we didn’t have very many persons with strong research backgrounds.”
Dr. [Benjamin Burks] Kendrick, who was head of the history department, had
done some American histories, I guess, that were widely used. And he had made a fine
reputation for himself. I believe Dr. [Albert] Keister had done that in economics. But
these were the exceptions. In fact, it was interesting that almost all of our faculty—we
didn’t call them professors. If they had their doctorate they were called Doctor, otherwise
you were Miss or Mister.
WL: Was there a hierarchy between them, or not?
MM: Not really, because many of the older persons had been here a great many years, and they
were—they thought of themselves as scholarly women. They were predominantly
women; a heavy proportion of our faculty at that time were women.
WL: Who would have been some of the prominent faculty leaders in the late thirties and
forties?
MM: Well, Harriet Elliott, interestingly enough, who was the dean of students, was very much
interested in the area of applied politics. And she was active in political organizations.
And she got the students interested in political organizations. And Miss [Louise]
Alexander, that she brought in, who had a law degree and was at one time—oh, I’ve
forgotten what she was, maybe she was clerk of the court or maybe she was here in the
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city. But anyway, she came into the department full time, and she was a beloved political
science teacher, all in the applied areas.
And Miss Elliott got me interested. I went with her to the 1940 White House
Conference for Children. She got me in on that and I started—. She was very much
interested in everything that related to the well being of women, children—was into
politics, very active in that way.
Others, oh, let me see who some of the ones that were here when I came. Dr.
Keister, of course, in economics, Dr. [James] Highsmith in psychology. Now the
psychology department was really a department that prepared and taught introductory and
educational psychology predominantly, and then they had a few other courses. But their
students were the students who were preparing to be teachers.
WL: So they were kind of a service department for teachers?
MM: Dr. [Mary] Coleman, head of physical education, was a national figure in women’s
physical education—and really a national figure.
WL: That has always been a strong department here.
MM: Yes, it has. We had a good department of home economics, but it developed greater
strengths later. But Ms. [Margaret] Edwards was looked on as one of the senior faculty—
very strong. And then we had a number of people like—in history—Vera Largent, Ms.
[Bernice] Draper— people who had devoted their lives to this university and who were
long-time friends of other historians like Frank [Porter] Graham [president of the
Consolidated University of North Carolina] himself, you know, and that generation of
scholarly women who were interested in developing graduates who would be effective in
their communities. The course I taught in community had students from all over various
departments in that class, and it was a study of, really, the kinds of services that were set
up in the community to meet the needs of the people.
WL: What you’ve described suggests that there was a real sense of mission on the part of
the—?
MM: There was, there was. And the graduates came out of the college with a great sense of
loyalty to the things that the college had meant to them. And I again speak of it from the
point of view of our own majors who came back. Every year we’d see them at the state
conferences, for example, the State Conference for Social Services. Always our graduates
stood out. They were people who were in their local communities taking positions of
responsibility and very active in a variety of kinds of community services.
And I think our teachers stood out in communities as persons who were well-qualified
persons in not only the school system, but in a sense of making contributions to
community life.
WL: How did the faculty interact with administration here or what kind of—?
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MM: We didn’t have much administration. [laughs] There were department heads, and the
department heads were for life as far as, you know, unless they didn’t want to be
department heads. (I was going to make us some sausage, by the way.) Department heads
were persons who helped recruit faculty. And when I came, the dean of administration,
Dean [Walter Clinton] Jackson that later became chancellor, but at that time in ’34, when
we went into the university system, it was dean of administration. Prior to that, of course,
it was the President of the college.
WL: The dean of administration was effectively the head of the institution instead of the—
MM: And the dean of students. The dean of students was a very strong person, Miss Elliott.
And he and she worked together with the department heads, and it was—
WL: That was it. That was it—they had the dean of students and dean of administration?
MM: There wasn’t this extensive administration.
WL: The heads, I gather then, had a great deal of power or had a great deal of day-to-day—
MM: Well, the senior faculty. Well, there was always a strong sense of faculty, and the faculty
acted on things that related to faculty to academic matters.
WL: Such as curriculum?
MM: All curriculum, curriculum committee, I’m not sure we had a promotions committee. I
really don’t know enough about that to tell you until 1951 when I went into
administration because I was the first administrative officer in the academic area. From
that time on, every one of the areas that were related to academic—admissions, registrar,
summer school—all fell within academic.
WL: That fell within the area of faculty, or would that be under Jackson?
MM: That was under Jackson until I came. Well, under Jackson and then we changed to
chancellor, and Chancellor [Edward Kidder] Graham [Jr.] came in and in ’51 he
appointed me.
WL: You mentioned Walter Clinton Jackson. What kind of a person was he? What kind of an
educator?
MM: He was a—as an educator, I think he was committed to meeting the needs of women at
that time in the liberal arts college and the strengthening of work all the way along when
new areas were opened up. He taught, of course, also all the way along in biography
[history department], as I remember. As dean of administration, he was a warm person.
Now let me just illustrate from one point of view. When I came, I had a good bit
of material from China. And I had done some writing in China and had had a few things
published, and I fully intended to move right into and complete some of the materials I
7
had for publication. And Dean Jackson said, “Mereb, this community needs to know
more about China. When you’re asked to speak on China, I’d like to have you speak on
China.”
Well, this was a lot of work, you know. I was asked to speak to [the] Rotary Club.
And one Rotary Club gets you to another, and professional clubs want you as a speaker
and then another literary club wanted a speaker. And it seemed to me I spent an awful lot
of time doing that. And when I said that to Dean Jackson, he said, “Well, that’s
community service.”
And it was, you know; it was important, and I enjoyed it. But you can’t do some
of the things that you expected if you do others things. He had a real sense of using your
full strength, not only within the college but in the state and in the community. And so I
became active in the state and many organizations and professional organizations and
thoroughly enjoyed it.
But when you’re teaching twelve hours and really putting all your effort into the
classroom, it meant, from the faculty point of view, that these were the things that we
were expected to do and enjoyed and did them, I think many, many faculty did them very
well.
WL: Did the student life—let me change the subject a little bit. To what extent was the student
life—?
MM: Oh, we participated in the student life too. We were expected to serve as chaperones
when our turn came at dances. And the dances were chaperoned. And we had dinners that
we were expected to attend when students invited us to the dormitories, and different
students would visit with you afterwards in their living areas. This was a part of—
WL: Extended contact was expected then?
MM: And we were also advisors to all kinds of organizations. I remember saying, “I don’t
know much about the YW[CA].” And they said, “Well, we’d like to have you advise us
for us.” So I asked Professor Johnson, “You think that’s something I could—” “Oh,” he
said, “that’d be very good.” So I advised and enjoyed it. There was a participation in a
good many things on campus.
And Miss Elliott, as long as she was dean of students this was true. She wanted
full participation by the faculty in every phase of campus life. And we participated with
satisfaction. I spent many an evening discussing issues because everybody was interested
in China in the early years I came, and not many people had been there and just
discussing various phases of life in china, family life, student life.
WL: Was it—I suppose there was a regular kind of schedule of campus-wide events that
involved students. For example, you mentioned dances and—.
MM: Right.
WL: Were there other sort of events that involved, aside from dances—?
8
MM: Oh, the departments had department organizations, like sociology had Alpha Kappa
Delta. And we had meetings and programs, and the departments all did, I think. And then
there were a good many student activities on campus. And we had—students were
expected, of course, we had chapel once a week. And then we had—everybody was
expected, more or less expected, to attend the music series on the campus called—I
forgot what it was called then—the lecture series and the music series in the evening.
And we didn’t have evening classes. They said we can’t have any kind of evening
classes, not ever. We had nothing in the evenings because the students were expected to
participate in all these things. This was a part of the richness of the college experience.
WL: Were there classes on weekends, Saturdays, for instance?
MM: Yes, we had Saturday [classes] in the beginning. In fact, when I went into administrative
office I insisted that our office be open though we’d given up Saturday classes. Because I
felt that parents came in on Saturdays, and they needed—things they wanted to know on
campus, and our offices were closed. Yes, Saturday morning was—
WL: So there was a kind of access that—free access between students and faculty for this—?
MM: Oh yes. Faculty—the students, I think, felt very free to go to the faculty for extra work. I
remember in mathematics—Dr. [Helen] Barton, one of our outstanding persons heading
that department, and Dr. Barton had her faculty have extra teaching sessions for students
who were having difficulty in class in keeping up with the math that they were taking.
WL: Was there a kind of equal access or was there a similar kind of access among the
administrators, for example Dr. Elliott and Dr. Jackson? Did students feel comfortable?
MM: Yes, we felt very easy. Of course, I knew Miss Elliott, well; everybody knew Miss Elliott
and Dr. Jackson. I went to his office for all kinds of things. Glen [Johnson], the head of
sociology, would say, “Well, ask Dean Jackson what he thinks about that.”
WL: So you’d just walk over there?
MM: Ask him to make an appointment. It happened that Professor Johnson himself that way. I
don’t know about the other departments, you know, I can only speak at that point because
I was a young assistant professor. And I know the way in which Professor Johnson was
very easy and comfortable and open, and we would talk about things. I really never
thought of him, I guess, as a head. We met in the department; we met together; we talked
everything over together; we seemed to get along very easily. There were only three full
time and then one or two part time in the beginning.
WL: What about the students’ background? What you described here is a fairly homogenous
student body. Perhaps, well, maybe homogenous isn’t the right word, but a coherent
student body, felt as if there was an academic community, felt tied to each other. Did
students coming to this institution, did students come from diverse backgrounds? Was
9
their social composition diverse, their social class diverse, geographically presumably
they were diverse?
MM: Well, of course, they came from all over the state. I suppose they came from different
economic backgrounds in their communities. But by and large they were what I would
think of as middle class, from upper middle to early middle. Not—we didn’t have as
many scholarships, and I am not aware of having had—of ever having taught a tenant
farmer’s child, for example.
And we taught about the poverty in North Carolina and the South and changing
conditions. I am not aware of what I would call persons from fairly limited backgrounds.
I would call them more substantial than professional classes in North Carolinians, not the
range that we get now.
WL: Right. Coming more and more from urban backgrounds than rural backgrounds
generally, towns, villages?
MM: No, I think we have a good balance of rural and urban.
WL: But by definition, which is the way most colleges were in those days anyway, would have
had to have some means in order to—?
MM: Probably. And upwardly mobile, probably. By and large, persons from families where
their parents had not been college people. And I suppose many of them from families that
may not even have had high school graduates as parents, but parents with ambitions for
their children and helping them go to college to move ahead.
And of course, it was a real effort to send women to college when they weren’t
always going to be productive all their lives in the economy. They were going to be
productive, but it wasn’t outside the home.
WL: Was there much sense that—you mentioned earlier the effect that consolidation had—a
sense that consolidation of The University of North Carolina in the early 1930s. Was
there much sense after 1937 that things were perhaps going to change here? Or did it
seem as though things were pretty much going to remain the way they were?
MM: No, I think there was a sense of change in that—well, for example, in the thirties and
forties, we recruited many more faculty with their doctorates. This was an accepted part
of a requirement for promising young faculty that you brought in. Now that’s not true for
a great many instructors who were temporary or who might have been temporary. But
there was an expectation of doing more of developing of faculty that was a more
scholarly teaching faculty perhaps.
WL: And there was a marked change in that area during the forties? Was there—?
MM: Oh, I know there was in the forties, but I’m not sure in the late thirties or in the very early
forties if that was true. Gradually taking place.
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WL: What kind of effect, if any, did the war have, Second World War?
MM: Well, it had a real effect in many ways on our campus. Miss Elliott was on leave in
Washington [DC]. She was in the consumer region of whatever it was, defense [National
Advisory Defense Committee].
We had a camp here, ORD [Overseas Replacement Depot]. Of course, we had
men. Now historically our students went over to Chapel Hill, and all the Chapel Hill boys
would come over on the weekends, you know, they’d have dates. We had a lot of give
and take and social life on the weekends. But with ORD here we had to have new and
different kinds of regulations for life on the campus. Chaperoning was involved in affairs
where ORD soldiers were involved, bringing them onto campus and participating in the
community and community services.
WL: ORD is—what is ORD?
MM: Oh my, Overseas Replacement Depot.
WL: Oh, I see.
MM: I think that was it.
WL: So that there had to be—the previous regulations about—?
MM: We had to think through a lot of things—the way in which this affected the total
community, with the community absorbed these people and the way in which the college
did.
WL: When the war ended, presumably that brought changes as well or not?
MM: Well, by that time the situation on campus was changing. You know, we were having
different kinds of—women were moving, we were not really moving toward—yes, we
were moving toward master’s work in education. And then when women’s role and
women in society were beginning to open up a little more and there were new kinds of
opportunities. For example, in mathematics, many of our women who graduated here, Dr.
Barton placed in, oh, centers that had to do with events during the war, and then this had
opened up other areas for women so that mathematics became—there was a larger group
majoring in mathematics then ever had.
[End Tape 1, Side A—Tape 1, Side B is unintelligible]
[End of Interview]

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1
UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Mereb Mossman
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: October 4, 1989
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WL: I’d like to begin by discussing your early career at this institution, at what was then
Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina]. And I wonder if you’d—just to
begin, tell me a little bit about your background briefly, how you arrived here, where you
were born, what your education was—
MM: Why I came?
WL: Why you came, things like that, what brought you here.
MM: I came September of 1937. I had just spent six teaching years in a woman’s college
[Ginling College] in China. I had just returned to America in June of 1937 and gotten to
my folks’ little summer cottage in Colorado. And the dean from the University of
Chicago School of Social Work called me, and Dean Abbott said, “Professor [Glen]
Johnson from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina is here, and he
would like to interview you,”—she had told him about me—“for a position at the
Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina.” I said, “Oh, Dean Abbott, why
another woman’s college?”
I’d been in a women’s college and had thought I was just going back to the
University of Chicago, and be there and do a little teaching, as I had done before I left, in
the department and School of Social Work and finish my degree. And she said, “They
need someone with your background.” And she said, “Frank [Porter] Graham is the
president of The University of North Carolina. That’s why you should go to Woman’s
College. Think about it.”
So I went to Kansas City immediately and talked with Professor Johnson. And he
was very convincing about this is a very fine liberal arts college for women with a great
future. And I had no real reason in 1937 not to take a job, it was just that I hadn’t planned
to do it. But I came, and I stayed for thirty-six years until I retired. But I came because—
primarily because—in sociology they were looking for someone to work in the applied
area, and that’s where my strengths lay.
WL: So they were trying to expand the department and the whole area of applied sociology?
2
MM: Right, right. Sociology had just separated from economics and [inaudible] was head of
economics. And sociology was building, and they brought Dr. [Lyda Gordon] Shivers in
from Chapel Hill who had just finished her degree there to teach in the area of
criminology and family. And they were hunting for someone in the applied area to teach
primarily community, social statistics and sociology. And all of us taught introductory
sociology, and I was to do social problems. And that was really the reason I came to the
university—to Woman’s College.
But the Woman’s College, at that time, had just become a part of the Consolidated
University of North Carolina, which was a three institution, [North Carolina] State
[University], [The University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill and us. So we were called
the Woman’s College of The University of North Carolina. This had connotations that no
one really knew at that time might develop very interestingly. But we were still a
women’s college within the system.
And at that time, women were not admitted to undergraduate work at Chapel Hill
and State, so that we were the women’s institution. And we drew from all over the state
and the region and had a percentage of out-of-state students for women who wanted a
college degree.
WL: So that this institution had a kind of a monopoly or had a monopoly on the women in
North Carolina.
MM: Within the state system and the university system. Not in colleges—other state
colleges—but in the university system.
WL: What kind of a reputation did it have, coming in 1937? What kinds of things had you
heard about it?
MM: It had the reputation for being a very fine and good liberal arts college. At that time,
actually, we were educating—a large proportion of our women went into teaching. But
they always went through a liberal arts core of work before they took certification courses
in education in their—largely their junior and senior years—to teach in either primary,
secondary schools, mostly in the state of North Carolina.
WL: So what was part of the core curriculum, basic kind of history and—?
MM: History, social science, science, language requirements, primarily. And we, through the
years, in the next ten to fifteen years, the curriculum committee was always at work on
the basic curriculum. And the schools—well, there were no schools, they were all
departments at that time that had—that were preparing students for teaching—were really
committed to the core in the liberal arts and then developed into majors, largely in their
junior and senior years. And they went out with strong majors in their department.
And the minimum of education requirements, which varied, from time to time,
anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one hours. I think in all of our teacher education
programs they did supervised teaching. And then we established—and I’ve forgotten the
year—a practice school on campus, Curry School, and that went through high school, so
that students had a good portion of their experience on the campus, actually practice
3
teaching, and then would go out into the community for some portion of their supervised
teaching experience.
But the departments that now we think of as professional and not in the College of
Arts and Sciences, like home economics. That was a field, a very strong, open field for
women—business education, teaching—preparing for secretarial work and teaching
business education. Physical education—we had a very strong physical education,
women’s physical education, department. A fine department of music—it’s hard for me
to say department now, we’ve said school and college for so long—department of music.
And again, music education was the field that was open, but we also had fine—we did
not prepare professional musicians, but we had a very fine program in which we did
prepare persons to, well, practice for work in voice and piano teaching.
WL: Art? What about art?
MM: Well, art started—I’ve forgotten the year they started—and we developed a strong art
department. And then creative writing was started, later in the English department. But all
this was in the departmental structure and in applied work in sociology. Development in
public welfare opened up a field of work for social workers, and so we developed a pre-professional
program in social work which was certified at the state level. And our
students went out in the counties all over the state in the public welfare as social workers,
and that was a new field.
Now we did not have nursing; we had a pre-nursing program. But Chapel Hill had
the nursing program and preempted that. Through the years we tried to get a program, but
it wasn’t until much later that we were able to develop that.
WL: You’ve suggested something about the—well, we’ve been talking, I guess, about the
curriculum. What about the faculty that you found in your early years here? How would
you characterize the faculty? What were they like; what were their interests?
MM: Well, to tell you the truth, they were very much like the liberal arts faculty in the college
in which I taught in China. It was a women’s college, a sister college to Smith College,
and a very fine liberal arts college there. The—well, there were two women’s colleges in
China, but it was in Nanking. And it [Woman’s College] had devoted—predominantly
women faculty who—most of whom had their master’s, some of whom had their PhDs—
who were devoted teachers. And they were—now you might say that sounds like a high
school teacher, but they were fine college teachers at that time for the women who came
with the kind of background they came from—from high school. And it was a life on
campus that was a very community-minded life with an integration of the academic and
the social life of the campus brought together.
And the whole notion of educating a woman—Dr. McIver’s “Educate a woman,
you educate a family.” But it was you were getting a woman ready for a job because at
that time—bear in mind there were many women went out into teaching, secretarial or
social work positions but they anticipated marriage. And, by and large, they anticipated
stopping work and having their family. This was the model at that time so—
WL: Marriage was incompatible with work?
4
MM: No. At that time, it just wasn’t done as much as it came to be. There weren’t daycare
centers and so forth, and women hadn’t moved into careers where they continued work as
they did later in the fifties and sixties and moved into a new way of thinking.
So at that time—you asked when I came what was it like—these were well-qualified,
undergraduate teachers who were committed to seeing that their students had
learning opportunities and did all kinds of extracurricular things to bring them into new
kinds of learning experiences. These were faculty that were devoted faculty, but they
were not a research—what I would call a scholarly faculty.
But in many ways, many of them were scholarly teachers. They kept studying all
the time and working, but they did not do independent study. The teaching loads were
twelve hours,—by and large that was the pattern. That was four courses and often four
different courses—a couple of sections of introductory and then a couple of advanced
sections.
WL: Four different preparations. On what basis were the faculty advanced? Was it exclusively
based on teaching?
MM: Teaching and community service, interestingly enough. And when I say community
service, that was community and professional service, activities related to—for example,
participation in sociology, I’ll use as an illustration participation in the Southern
Sociological Society and then helping form a state society of sociologists. Scholarly in
that way so that I often, when people say, “Well, you didn’t have any scholars,” “Well,
we didn’t have very many persons with strong research backgrounds.”
Dr. [Benjamin Burks] Kendrick, who was head of the history department, had
done some American histories, I guess, that were widely used. And he had made a fine
reputation for himself. I believe Dr. [Albert] Keister had done that in economics. But
these were the exceptions. In fact, it was interesting that almost all of our faculty—we
didn’t call them professors. If they had their doctorate they were called Doctor, otherwise
you were Miss or Mister.
WL: Was there a hierarchy between them, or not?
MM: Not really, because many of the older persons had been here a great many years, and they
were—they thought of themselves as scholarly women. They were predominantly
women; a heavy proportion of our faculty at that time were women.
WL: Who would have been some of the prominent faculty leaders in the late thirties and
forties?
MM: Well, Harriet Elliott, interestingly enough, who was the dean of students, was very much
interested in the area of applied politics. And she was active in political organizations.
And she got the students interested in political organizations. And Miss [Louise]
Alexander, that she brought in, who had a law degree and was at one time—oh, I’ve
forgotten what she was, maybe she was clerk of the court or maybe she was here in the
5
city. But anyway, she came into the department full time, and she was a beloved political
science teacher, all in the applied areas.
And Miss Elliott got me interested. I went with her to the 1940 White House
Conference for Children. She got me in on that and I started—. She was very much
interested in everything that related to the well being of women, children—was into
politics, very active in that way.
Others, oh, let me see who some of the ones that were here when I came. Dr.
Keister, of course, in economics, Dr. [James] Highsmith in psychology. Now the
psychology department was really a department that prepared and taught introductory and
educational psychology predominantly, and then they had a few other courses. But their
students were the students who were preparing to be teachers.
WL: So they were kind of a service department for teachers?
MM: Dr. [Mary] Coleman, head of physical education, was a national figure in women’s
physical education—and really a national figure.
WL: That has always been a strong department here.
MM: Yes, it has. We had a good department of home economics, but it developed greater
strengths later. But Ms. [Margaret] Edwards was looked on as one of the senior faculty—
very strong. And then we had a number of people like—in history—Vera Largent, Ms.
[Bernice] Draper— people who had devoted their lives to this university and who were
long-time friends of other historians like Frank [Porter] Graham [president of the
Consolidated University of North Carolina] himself, you know, and that generation of
scholarly women who were interested in developing graduates who would be effective in
their communities. The course I taught in community had students from all over various
departments in that class, and it was a study of, really, the kinds of services that were set
up in the community to meet the needs of the people.
WL: What you’ve described suggests that there was a real sense of mission on the part of
the—?
MM: There was, there was. And the graduates came out of the college with a great sense of
loyalty to the things that the college had meant to them. And I again speak of it from the
point of view of our own majors who came back. Every year we’d see them at the state
conferences, for example, the State Conference for Social Services. Always our graduates
stood out. They were people who were in their local communities taking positions of
responsibility and very active in a variety of kinds of community services.
And I think our teachers stood out in communities as persons who were well-qualified
persons in not only the school system, but in a sense of making contributions to
community life.
WL: How did the faculty interact with administration here or what kind of—?
6
MM: We didn’t have much administration. [laughs] There were department heads, and the
department heads were for life as far as, you know, unless they didn’t want to be
department heads. (I was going to make us some sausage, by the way.) Department heads
were persons who helped recruit faculty. And when I came, the dean of administration,
Dean [Walter Clinton] Jackson that later became chancellor, but at that time in ’34, when
we went into the university system, it was dean of administration. Prior to that, of course,
it was the President of the college.
WL: The dean of administration was effectively the head of the institution instead of the—
MM: And the dean of students. The dean of students was a very strong person, Miss Elliott.
And he and she worked together with the department heads, and it was—
WL: That was it. That was it—they had the dean of students and dean of administration?
MM: There wasn’t this extensive administration.
WL: The heads, I gather then, had a great deal of power or had a great deal of day-to-day—
MM: Well, the senior faculty. Well, there was always a strong sense of faculty, and the faculty
acted on things that related to faculty to academic matters.
WL: Such as curriculum?
MM: All curriculum, curriculum committee, I’m not sure we had a promotions committee. I
really don’t know enough about that to tell you until 1951 when I went into
administration because I was the first administrative officer in the academic area. From
that time on, every one of the areas that were related to academic—admissions, registrar,
summer school—all fell within academic.
WL: That fell within the area of faculty, or would that be under Jackson?
MM: That was under Jackson until I came. Well, under Jackson and then we changed to
chancellor, and Chancellor [Edward Kidder] Graham [Jr.] came in and in ’51 he
appointed me.
WL: You mentioned Walter Clinton Jackson. What kind of a person was he? What kind of an
educator?
MM: He was a—as an educator, I think he was committed to meeting the needs of women at
that time in the liberal arts college and the strengthening of work all the way along when
new areas were opened up. He taught, of course, also all the way along in biography
[history department], as I remember. As dean of administration, he was a warm person.
Now let me just illustrate from one point of view. When I came, I had a good bit
of material from China. And I had done some writing in China and had had a few things
published, and I fully intended to move right into and complete some of the materials I
7
had for publication. And Dean Jackson said, “Mereb, this community needs to know
more about China. When you’re asked to speak on China, I’d like to have you speak on
China.”
Well, this was a lot of work, you know. I was asked to speak to [the] Rotary Club.
And one Rotary Club gets you to another, and professional clubs want you as a speaker
and then another literary club wanted a speaker. And it seemed to me I spent an awful lot
of time doing that. And when I said that to Dean Jackson, he said, “Well, that’s
community service.”
And it was, you know; it was important, and I enjoyed it. But you can’t do some
of the things that you expected if you do others things. He had a real sense of using your
full strength, not only within the college but in the state and in the community. And so I
became active in the state and many organizations and professional organizations and
thoroughly enjoyed it.
But when you’re teaching twelve hours and really putting all your effort into the
classroom, it meant, from the faculty point of view, that these were the things that we
were expected to do and enjoyed and did them, I think many, many faculty did them very
well.
WL: Did the student life—let me change the subject a little bit. To what extent was the student
life—?
MM: Oh, we participated in the student life too. We were expected to serve as chaperones
when our turn came at dances. And the dances were chaperoned. And we had dinners that
we were expected to attend when students invited us to the dormitories, and different
students would visit with you afterwards in their living areas. This was a part of—
WL: Extended contact was expected then?
MM: And we were also advisors to all kinds of organizations. I remember saying, “I don’t
know much about the YW[CA].” And they said, “Well, we’d like to have you advise us
for us.” So I asked Professor Johnson, “You think that’s something I could—” “Oh,” he
said, “that’d be very good.” So I advised and enjoyed it. There was a participation in a
good many things on campus.
And Miss Elliott, as long as she was dean of students this was true. She wanted
full participation by the faculty in every phase of campus life. And we participated with
satisfaction. I spent many an evening discussing issues because everybody was interested
in China in the early years I came, and not many people had been there and just
discussing various phases of life in china, family life, student life.
WL: Was it—I suppose there was a regular kind of schedule of campus-wide events that
involved students. For example, you mentioned dances and—.
MM: Right.
WL: Were there other sort of events that involved, aside from dances—?
8
MM: Oh, the departments had department organizations, like sociology had Alpha Kappa
Delta. And we had meetings and programs, and the departments all did, I think. And then
there were a good many student activities on campus. And we had—students were
expected, of course, we had chapel once a week. And then we had—everybody was
expected, more or less expected, to attend the music series on the campus called—I
forgot what it was called then—the lecture series and the music series in the evening.
And we didn’t have evening classes. They said we can’t have any kind of evening
classes, not ever. We had nothing in the evenings because the students were expected to
participate in all these things. This was a part of the richness of the college experience.
WL: Were there classes on weekends, Saturdays, for instance?
MM: Yes, we had Saturday [classes] in the beginning. In fact, when I went into administrative
office I insisted that our office be open though we’d given up Saturday classes. Because I
felt that parents came in on Saturdays, and they needed—things they wanted to know on
campus, and our offices were closed. Yes, Saturday morning was—
WL: So there was a kind of access that—free access between students and faculty for this—?
MM: Oh yes. Faculty—the students, I think, felt very free to go to the faculty for extra work. I
remember in mathematics—Dr. [Helen] Barton, one of our outstanding persons heading
that department, and Dr. Barton had her faculty have extra teaching sessions for students
who were having difficulty in class in keeping up with the math that they were taking.
WL: Was there a kind of equal access or was there a similar kind of access among the
administrators, for example Dr. Elliott and Dr. Jackson? Did students feel comfortable?
MM: Yes, we felt very easy. Of course, I knew Miss Elliott, well; everybody knew Miss Elliott
and Dr. Jackson. I went to his office for all kinds of things. Glen [Johnson], the head of
sociology, would say, “Well, ask Dean Jackson what he thinks about that.”
WL: So you’d just walk over there?
MM: Ask him to make an appointment. It happened that Professor Johnson himself that way. I
don’t know about the other departments, you know, I can only speak at that point because
I was a young assistant professor. And I know the way in which Professor Johnson was
very easy and comfortable and open, and we would talk about things. I really never
thought of him, I guess, as a head. We met in the department; we met together; we talked
everything over together; we seemed to get along very easily. There were only three full
time and then one or two part time in the beginning.
WL: What about the students’ background? What you described here is a fairly homogenous
student body. Perhaps, well, maybe homogenous isn’t the right word, but a coherent
student body, felt as if there was an academic community, felt tied to each other. Did
students coming to this institution, did students come from diverse backgrounds? Was
9
their social composition diverse, their social class diverse, geographically presumably
they were diverse?
MM: Well, of course, they came from all over the state. I suppose they came from different
economic backgrounds in their communities. But by and large they were what I would
think of as middle class, from upper middle to early middle. Not—we didn’t have as
many scholarships, and I am not aware of having had—of ever having taught a tenant
farmer’s child, for example.
And we taught about the poverty in North Carolina and the South and changing
conditions. I am not aware of what I would call persons from fairly limited backgrounds.
I would call them more substantial than professional classes in North Carolinians, not the
range that we get now.
WL: Right. Coming more and more from urban backgrounds than rural backgrounds
generally, towns, villages?
MM: No, I think we have a good balance of rural and urban.
WL: But by definition, which is the way most colleges were in those days anyway, would have
had to have some means in order to—?
MM: Probably. And upwardly mobile, probably. By and large, persons from families where
their parents had not been college people. And I suppose many of them from families that
may not even have had high school graduates as parents, but parents with ambitions for
their children and helping them go to college to move ahead.
And of course, it was a real effort to send women to college when they weren’t
always going to be productive all their lives in the economy. They were going to be
productive, but it wasn’t outside the home.
WL: Was there much sense that—you mentioned earlier the effect that consolidation had—a
sense that consolidation of The University of North Carolina in the early 1930s. Was
there much sense after 1937 that things were perhaps going to change here? Or did it
seem as though things were pretty much going to remain the way they were?
MM: No, I think there was a sense of change in that—well, for example, in the thirties and
forties, we recruited many more faculty with their doctorates. This was an accepted part
of a requirement for promising young faculty that you brought in. Now that’s not true for
a great many instructors who were temporary or who might have been temporary. But
there was an expectation of doing more of developing of faculty that was a more
scholarly teaching faculty perhaps.
WL: And there was a marked change in that area during the forties? Was there—?
MM: Oh, I know there was in the forties, but I’m not sure in the late thirties or in the very early
forties if that was true. Gradually taking place.
10
WL: What kind of effect, if any, did the war have, Second World War?
MM: Well, it had a real effect in many ways on our campus. Miss Elliott was on leave in
Washington [DC]. She was in the consumer region of whatever it was, defense [National
Advisory Defense Committee].
We had a camp here, ORD [Overseas Replacement Depot]. Of course, we had
men. Now historically our students went over to Chapel Hill, and all the Chapel Hill boys
would come over on the weekends, you know, they’d have dates. We had a lot of give
and take and social life on the weekends. But with ORD here we had to have new and
different kinds of regulations for life on the campus. Chaperoning was involved in affairs
where ORD soldiers were involved, bringing them onto campus and participating in the
community and community services.
WL: ORD is—what is ORD?
MM: Oh my, Overseas Replacement Depot.
WL: Oh, I see.
MM: I think that was it.
WL: So that there had to be—the previous regulations about—?
MM: We had to think through a lot of things—the way in which this affected the total
community, with the community absorbed these people and the way in which the college
did.
WL: When the war ended, presumably that brought changes as well or not?
MM: Well, by that time the situation on campus was changing. You know, we were having
different kinds of—women were moving, we were not really moving toward—yes, we
were moving toward master’s work in education. And then when women’s role and
women in society were beginning to open up a little more and there were new kinds of
opportunities. For example, in mathematics, many of our women who graduated here, Dr.
Barton placed in, oh, centers that had to do with events during the war, and then this had
opened up other areas for women so that mathematics became—there was a larger group
majoring in mathematics then ever had.
[End Tape 1, Side A—Tape 1, Side B is unintelligible]
[End of Interview]